Decided to clean my house today, as it’s been too long and we have a spate of company this week. I was thinking this was excellent timing, as the girls have half-days and I thought I could put the big one to work.
So far in two hours, with many interruptions, I have made the soda bread, dusted, cleaned the upstairs, picked up odds and ends like books, newspapers, and magazines, done the dishes, swept the upstairs, put in a couple of loads of laundry, and answered emails. Normal busy afternoon, right? After I get off this I will get cracking on finishing the downstairs.
I have assigned my big kid to change her sheets and make her bed. As I write this, she is STILL working on it. Two hours later. She approaches everything with the same snail-like zeal. It can take her a half hour or more to get dressed.
I know that most little kids are slow, and it’s a loft bed, but DAMN. I feel torn, because at close to this age I was given a whole list of chores on a Saturday and told to hop-to. I know that proficiency comes with time, but when it is this painful to watch I want to clean around her. I had a dream that she would clean the bathrooms today, but I don’t know if there will be time. Eventually she will work faster because she will want to be done, right? How can I tell someone with no perspective on the matter that two hours is too long to take to make a bed?
I know by having her be responsible and helping she is 1. learning how to take care of a house and 2. she is learning how to be a contributing family member but GODDAMN watching her clean is like nails on the blackboard, watching paint dry or…like watching a little kid clean. Please, any words of wisdom?
All three of my kids have chores (which they must do in order to earn their age in dollars per week) and many times I must physically leave the room to prevent myself from snatching the cloth/sheet/towel or whatever out of their little hands and doing it myself.
So, leave the room. Do not go near the room.
Alternately, my four year old can get ANYTHING done (like, say, build a house from scratch) if you set a timer and promise him a goddamned “CARS” sticker if he finishes before the little *DING* is heard.
Meh.
Bourbon.
I have a 14-year-old and a 9-year-old, and I will be watching your comments closely to see if anybody has any good ideas. Because I’m tapped out over here.
Actually, yeah, wait. If we’re talking about non-bedroom stuff, time and experience will totally speed her up; my older kid is fast and effective in the dishwasher/clean counters department. But bedroom stuff? Oh, hell no. I can’t watch. It hurts me. And there are many trips to the door of their room to say “hurry up for THE LOVE OF GOD.”
I have three boys (almost 13&11, and 5). They do chores. They whine and cry. They cajole and complain. They scream and stamp their feet. I grip my forehead and wonder if 1:00 is too early for a beer? Usually I tell myself that it is a weekend and then just drink that beer and tell hem to snap to it. They do. And you know what? They will be better partners for all of it. Laundry, bathrooms, cooking will all be something they will do without needing their wives/husbands to teach them. They (the partners) will love you for it. Keep up the good work. Stick to your guns and have the whiskey, beer, whatever, to get you through. They do get better at it and become real help to you too…
You need an incentive to finish fast, yo!
Some kinda shiznit like, do job x in y minutes, get a party hat. Or, as soon as you’re done with job x, you get to do fun activity y.
Shoddy work disqualifies (or calls for a redo), natch.
Caveat: I have no younguns of my own, don’t kill me for having suggestions anyway (you won’t) – but I did work with kids for 9 years, and I made them do all kinds of basic cleanup chores every day. The slowness, it killed me BAD. Incentives were the only way around it.
I have a 7 year old who took, I kid you not, 10 minutes to put on his socks today. My only advice is to lower your own expectations… it’s worked for me. 10 minutes? Record time! Now let’s put our pants on in under and hour!
Gotta agree with the “walk away, walk away” point of view. I make my kids fold towels, unload the dishwasher, etc., and sometimes it takes all of my strength to not jerk things out of their hands or point out how they can do it quicker/faster/better…because you know, they will figure it out and I don’t need to sound like a shrew on top of being Mean Mommy Who Makes Them Do Chores.
15 and 17 year old males = SLACKERS. i push and needle and cajole and they still slack. i find it funny on teh inside cuz i was the same total SLACK meister me. they get by little by little, pick your battle, mostly its about driving and getting GRADES more than chores…whine whine whine…no wonder my dad laffed and laffed when he found out i had two boys…
I have two girls, 8 and 10. I also have a house cleaner come twice a month to do the big jobs; I work, and my husband is going through chemotherapy for colorectal cancer, and could not clean even when he was healthy. He does a lot of laundry, as he is not working — I have delegated it to him. The girls are responsible for their rooms, and also cleaning up after playing in other rooms. I do all the sheet-changing. It works out really well. I agree that everyone needs to help-out. I try not to turn it into a big family feud or anything. I like to spend time organizing, not cleaning. I pay $18/hour for the cleaner; best money I ever spent.
You mean they are capable of more than one speed?? My 5 year old boy does everything at the speed of drying paint…seriously…from eating to getting dressed to running. He has earned the nickname “Myrtle the Turtle” and hates it, lemme tell yeh. As far as cleaning, he wants “help” with everything! Or he’s simply “too tired” to clean….add in heavy doses of whining and sighing and that’s my life. I threaten to take away toy/video game du jour and sometimes it gets him to move a bit faster. Follow through with threat is very important; otherwise threats become meaningless – I say no “insert coveted item here” and boy knows I mean it. Rambling. Best of luck to you. Try to meditate to that good ol saying, “A clean house is the sign of a sick mind.”!!
I don’t think there’s much help for it. Kids cleaning=moms going insane underneath a thin, but brilliant patina of patience.
It helps if you can make a game of it-especially if the game is amusing to you as well as them.
When Rowan and Ben lived with us and the kids were a bit younger, we used to play robot and master games(in fact that’s where the Robotic Cats got their start). The kids were Robotic cats and their ‘masters’ got to order them to do the chores.
The fact that they were robotic machines seemed to make them hop to it slightly more efficiently than otherwise, although it could backfire if the robots broke down or something spastic like that and as with all munchkin activities, you gotta stay on top of it if it’s going to stay at all effective, otherwise the robots will build a ladder(of your nice clean laundry)to the sky(the garbage pail)and take over the world(when you turn around, notice the devastation and your brain implodes).
Possible: Very friendly and non-critical instruction of a fast way to make a bed. And when that doesn’t work, nothing. Praise even maybe. She’ll get faster, eventually. If she is incrementally faster, praise her speed. But I’d be very careful not to criticize. It could turn her into a perfectionist (or a worse perfectionist) and then making a bed will take days, rather than hours.
I’m big on using a timer, when I remember to. It helps me, too. And is more effective than having my head detach and fly around the room, though that’s often what happens.
I tell my kids there will be no food until everything they have been given to do is done correctly.
OK… that’s a lie. lawl
I got nothin’ my girls are just as bad, hey when you do find a trick that works could you let me know?
I think the suggestion of bourbon is right on. I remind my kids every 15 minutes or so what they should be doing with one word like “Bed” or “Laundry” and such because I’m not going to battle over the chore with them. They simply get reminded until it gets done, even if it takes 10 years and causes me to lose my mind.
My 9 yr old is painfully slow at tasks too. I have to leave the room so I don’t take over and do chores for her.
Incentives! I remember when I was little, I couldn’t go outside and play, watch t.v., have dessert, etc., until my chores were done! This worked especially well on a Saturdays when all my friends were doing fun things.
But then again, my mom would whack the hell out of me with one of those big, thick 1970’s hip-hugger belts if I didn’t do my chores too.
Break out the belt! (just kidding) :-)
My six is pretty quick; he knows he gets back to playing sooner if he gets the unpleasant tasks taken care of. Believe me, if I could figure out how he learned that I’d teach a seminar.
Because my four is impossible. The only thing he’ll do fast is pick up stuff off the floor when I’m going to vacuum. A few treasured pieces of LEGO sucked up into the Dyson and that lesson was LEARND! It helps that he could see them whirling away inside the transparent cylinder. Oh, spiteful Dyson!
Oh and clear the table, cause there will be no wrestling with Daddy until the dishes are done.
So I’d say pick chores with built-in incentives.
Yeah, I don’t clean. I hire other people to do it. I once had a fanciful notion that if I had kids I could get THEM to clean for me, but then I remembered that child labor laws probably prevent me from putting them to work the way I’d want. Plus there’s that whole, you know, HAVING KIDS thing that I don’t really care for.
OH GOD. What I am getting here is that we’re all alone. Together. Yet alone.
I appreciate the incentives ideas, though.
I would also go with the worm of reciprocity. You know, where you ask them to do something, and then act like a huge jerky accountant when they ask for something in return. “What, you want me to cut up your apple? Did you put your dirty clothes in the washing? No? Well, no, then.” It works because it can get the message across that all that stuff they make you do is not actually, you know, FUN.
I too have a seven year old who takes 4-fucking-ever to get dressed. I am ashamed to say he doesn’t have regular chores, though he does get asked to “help mama” when I’m doing stuff, and about 3/4ths of the time he’s pretty cheerful (if slow) about doing so.
I actually asked him the other day:
“look, kid, it *drives me crazy* to have to come in and tell you over and over and over and over and over and over again to do whatever it is you’re supposed to be doing. I don’t want to yell at you (though *really* getting mad *will* get him to snap to), and I’m sick of having to basically stand over you to get anything done. You’re a smart kid, and you’re seven, for chrissakes, I *know* you can get yourself dressed more quickly. What in the world do I have to do to get you to cooperate?
His suggestion was to take away his video games. So I have been saying (not too often, lest it lose its power) that if he doesn’t cooperate, he doesn’t get to play video games after school. It works. (Pretty well. I mean, he’s still not exactly efficient.)
So my suggestion, depending on your kid’s personality, is that it might not hurt to just lay out what’s driving you nuts and ask them what you could do to motivate their little asses.
I have only been able to figure out how to get my kid to do one thing, and that is to pick her junk up off her floor. I set a timer, and if it isn’t done by x time, the Invisible Roomba [i.e., me, with a plastic bin] comes and sucks it all up. So far the roomba has gone hungry.
Also: sometimes we pay her to wash dishes, since we no longer have a dishwasher. 5 cents a dish, 1 cent for silverware. For a while she was into it, but now not so much.
If she packs her own lunch she gets to put a piece of candy in it from her stash.
And sometimes if she gets inspired she will volunteer to wash the bathroom sink, just for the heck of it.
But I have to admit that it has never even occurred to me to try to get her to change her sheets. Because not only would it take her three or four hours, but there would be so much weeping and whining and gnashing of teeth that we would all need to be medicated afterwards.
Oh my god. I am a wuss.
A bit of advice my roommate’s parents gave me: You have to find your kid’s “currency”. That’s where you hit. If the video games are it, take them. If the TV is it, shut it off. Once you start attacking their currency they become far more interested in completing tasks. My daughter can earn $5 a week. At first I had it broken down into a certain amount per chore, but then I found that she didn’t mind missing smaller amounts by not doing the things she really didn’t like-she’s a clever one, so now it’s just $5 a week. If she does something half assed or misses it then she loses the whole week. If she loses the whole week early and decides to just skip the rest, she is punished for not doing the chores by losing the TV and her cell phone. So far she’s not worked a way around it, thankfully…
A kitchen timer works well even without the sticker! Let’s play “Beat the Clock”!
I found that if I race Moomin in doing something, like folding clothes, and I only use one hand, and it’s my left hand, it evens things out a bit.
I guess the short answer is, making it a game where time is part of the game, but where being slow and perfectionist isn’t quite failure, either.
elswhere and whatladder, I’m so going to use your ideas!
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